A New Year picture (Chinese: 年画) (Pinyin: Nían Hùa), is an important and popular Banhua in China. It is a form of Chinese coloured woodblock printing, for decoration during the Chinese New Year Holiday.
Its original form was a picture of a door god fashioned during the Qin Dynasty. Later, more subjects, such as conventions, carnivals, the Kitchen God, women and babies were included. Customarily, as each Chinese New Year arrives, every family modifies its New Year picture in order to "say goodbye to the Past and welcome the Future" (Chinese: 辞旧迎新).
In the 19th century Nianhua were massed produced and displayed as a new medium for the majority of Chinese who could not read. They often depicted the Chinese point of view of events.[1]
They were used for propaganda purposes, to create patriotic sentiment, many Nianhua were produced during the Boxer Rebellion depicting the Muslim Kansu Brave forces of General Dong Fuxiang, showing them as victorious over the 8 nation alliance of the western powers and Japan.[2]
The most famous production places for New Year Pictures in China are Sichuan, Tianjin, Shandong, and Suzhou. Among the best four, Yangliuqing, from Tianjin was regarded as the greatest. Yanliuqing’s paintings were first produced between 1573 and 1620.
The New Year Pictures in Sichuan were mostly come from Mianzhu. Mianzhu’s New Year Pictures was different from other places’. Mianzhu’s has its own rules to produce the New Year Pictures. It requires symmetry, completeness, Equilibrium, clear in the picture and contains a moral meaning. It originates from earlier Song Dynasty and booming in late Ming and early Qing Dynasty. In its prosperous time, there were more than 300 workshops in Mianzhu. In addition, the production were transported and sold not only in different parts of China, but also sold to India, Japan and other countries.
As the development of the times, people’s aesthetic standard was changing by the influence of modern arts. Most of New Year Pictures were lack of imagination. Moreover, people tend to consider that door god was too scared to hang in home. They pursue something more artistic. At the middle of 1980s, the sales amount of New Year Pictures in Mianzhu was around five hundred thousand. However, the number dropped sharply since early 1990s.
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